Print POSTER-SIZE!

Hey Peeps! It's Traci from Dragonflies in First. I've got a quick little tutorial for you on printing things poster-sized using your regular ol' printer - no trip to the print shop necessary!

Printing .pdf pages poster-sized is quite simple. Here's how:

First, be sure your file is saved as a .pdf and open the document using Adobe Reader. Then, select the page you want to print poster-sized.

In the print menu I just selected one of the pages from my An Exciting New School Year - Writing and Punctuation Activities and a Craft! resource. 

If you simply click POSTER on this Adobe reader Print menu it will print to 11X17, but won't really enlarge the image. However, by setting the Tile Scale to 200%, you will have a much larger poster sized (22 x 22.5) finished product. 

Those dotted lines in the preview denote where you will combine your pages. In this sample, it will take 6 pages to make this enlarged poster.

You can adjust it even farther by changing the overlap option. Total personal preference here and something you need to play with to see what you like best. It defaults to .005". 

Just print on card stock, tape the parts together on the back side and then laminate.

That's it! Easy Peasy.

For you resource creators, you've probably noticed that most programs do not give you the option to print poster-size in the print menu. You can tell PowerPoint what size you want your finished product, but you will have to save to .pdf and follow the steps above to print it at that enlarged size using your regular printer.

However, there is one program that makes printing poster-size easy. Several people ask me about printing my planners to several sheets and poster-size, so here's how...

Excel is AWESOME at printing things poster-sized. Each year I print my team's year plan (curriculum pacing map) poster-sized for our shared area (it's in our pod between our classes). This allows all of us to refer to it easily while we are planning and our special ed and other resource teachers visit it often so they, too, stay on the "same page". I highly recommend year planning/mapping and printing your plan LARGE for your grade level. It makes life so much easier. :)

The poster on this wall is about 20" wide and 16" tall. It is an enlargement of my year plan from last school year, an 8 1/2 x 11 document, printed to 2 pages wide by 2 pages tall.

In order to do that in Excel, you just need to go to the print menu (no .pdf necessary) and change the scaling to tell it how many pages you'd like to print to...

It couldn't be easier!

Now you're all set to go poster creating crazy for this upcoming school year!!

Thanks for hopping by! Don't forget about our Christmas in July Sale! I'm announcing the next part of my sale on my FB page today!